


You Would Never

by Ninjaninaiii



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dorks in Love, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Plants, Post-Canon, Temporary Amnesia, it's a trope i've always wanted to do ahh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 06:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6789724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ninjaninaiii/pseuds/Ninjaninaiii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had, of course, started with a “you would never,” which nearly always led to situations where Crowley would sit, and think, “I should never have ever.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This humble fic has a big shoutout to light of the GO fandom Kogla: http://kogla.tumblr.com/tagged/good-omens
> 
> Please check her blog before reading if you can? Kogla's ponytail!Crowley keeps me alive, and so this fic is like. A backstory for some of her art.

Crowley might have been willing to admit he had made a mistake. If admitting that he had made a mistake would help him to escape the situation, he would have admitted it with very little hesitance and only a smidge of mustered sarcasm, just for good show. He would even consider submitting himself to a multitude of ‘I told you so’s.

It had, of course, started with a “you would never,” which nearly always led to situations where Crowley would sit, and think, “I should never have ever.”

It was insufferably hot, and not like the blinding heat of hell, either. Though, he thought, he didn’t particularly like that heat, hence his wish to remain on earth, away from it.

This heat was also accompanied by dust, a pain in his back and the overwhelming sense that he had made a very big mistake.

The box he had been sitting on for the past three days; leaning against a particularly comfortable cactus, contained, he had found out on the second day (when he had given in to his boredom), an array of particularly horrible-looking bottles. He had discovered very little about the contents of the bottles from the label but the vaguely discouraging triple X, and so he had thought something along the lines of ‘why not’ and had promptly started to drink.

It was nearly exactly as horrible as he had thought it would be: namely, not very. He couldn’t decide if the taste was made better or worse by the heat of the drink, very nearly boiling from sitting out in the sun, in a box, in a desert.

It was strong, though, strong enough that halfway through the first bottle he could practically feel himself slowing down, a novelty as a demon. It usually took a good-sized barrel to get quite so wasted. Apart from that one time, in that fishing village in Russia, where he had been blind drunk after two shots of a particularly vicious home-brewed vodka. That had been when…

Crowley blinked, wondering who he had been with. Strange. He could remember the entirety of the night, down to the exact stickiness of the bar, yet his drinking partner was apparently non-existent. Very strange. Perhaps he had been alone? But no, he distinctly remembered a very messy kiss that had very nearly had them arrested… So male, perhaps, or as male-presenting as creatures like himself could be.

There was a dog-tag around his neck and Crowley contemplated taking it off and throwing it into the vast expanse of dirt and rubble behind him. The metal of the necklace was scalding, enough that it felt like it might just melt into his skin, but to remove it would have been to touch it, and Crowley did not want to inflict such punishment on his fingers.

He had checked the tags on the first day. ‘Samuel Kaktos’, he had read, and rolled his eyes. Either he had stolen the tags from some very unfortunate soldier, or Crowley’s creativity had suffered from a momentary lapse, he wasn’t entirely sure.

He wasn’t sure because he couldn’t remember. His inability to remember, he thought, probably had much to do with the situation he was currently in.

-

“Look at this cactusss, isssn’t he perfect? Beautiful, dangerousss and eternal!”

“Yes Crowley, you’ve said as such several times tonight.” Aziraphale hadn’t exactly patted him on the head, but his tone implied as much. “I see you are very proud of it.”

“‘Him’,” Crowley said, not letting Aziraphale’s patronisation effect his jollity. _“His_ name is Sam.”

“Sam, of course. Short for Samuel, very apt. ‘Name of God’. A perfect name for one as beautiful, dangerous and eternal.”

Crowley spent a moment wondering whether his subconscious had, in fact, named the cactus after the prophet, or whether he had taken the name from someone recently dispatched by his hands, and had thus been playing on his mind. With no little annoyance, he could not think of any such circumstance. “Not Sssamuel,” Crowley said, agitated. “ _Sam_.”

It was also starting to irk that he had to concentrate on saying the name if he didn’t want to hiss when he said it. But named him now and changing the name would only serve to prove Aziraphale right. About what, Crowley wasn’t exactly sure, but he was sure it would. The angel just hummed an ‘of course, dear’.

“I want to get him a sibling,” Crowley mused after a while, playing with the potted cactus’ little flower, though lightly so that he wouldn’t hurt him. “He seems so lonely.”

“I doubt plants can be lonely,” Aziraphale said, though he didn’t sound so sure. “I always have wonder whether plants had souls…” He trailed off, in thought, but decided such a concept could be considered later, or, if it proved too troublesome, he would request the information from his higher-ups. He had never seen a plant _go_ to heaven, of course, but what was heaven if not one giant paradise _full_ of plants? And Eden, there too was bountiful… Again, Aziraphale reigned in the train of thought.

“I suppose you could always go to that new garden centre, the one Anathema was enthusing about.” Aziraphale took a sip of his cocoa, feeling the warmth of it, the house, and Crowley’s head in his lap culminating in perhaps one of the most comforting feelings he had ever felt.

He could feel himself dozing already, though kept one eye on Crowley, knowing the demon was quick to offend when he was feeling particularly enthusiastic, as he was evidently feeling tonight. “I heard they served a premium Afternoon tea… perhaps we could make a day of it.”

“I should get one in the wild. Australia. Do they grow in Australia? I’m imagining the red dirt, but I can’t tell if I’m mixing up my places.”

“No, remember, we were there when they introduced them to Australia.” Aziraphle undid his top shirt button, attempting to reach peak comfort. “When _was_ it... some time in the nineteenth century, I’m sure. One of those ‘and it became an invasive weed’ stories.”

Crowley hummed, slowly remembering having had a hand in that particular disaster. _He_ at least, had thought they spiced up the place. _He_ thought they were cool, even in the _Australians_ didn’t.

“They’re native to the Americas, dear. Really, the garden centre is much closer…” Aziraphale ended with a yawn, setting his mug down on the nearest table with a gratuitous use of magic.

“I haven’t been to Chile in a while…”

“All that way for a cactus...?” Another yawn. “ _Crowley_... you would never....” and with the half-formed thought, Aziraphale was asleep.

Crowley had sat up without, unfortunately, realising Aziraphale’s head lolling against the sofa, deeply offended at the implication of laziness, but vaguely hoping Aziraphale would make some objection to his leaving ( _the position_ had _been comfortable,_ he thought with some regret.) When no such objection had been raised, Crowley had magicked himself away without looking back.

A series of vaguely unfortunate events in which he proceeded to gamble away his short-term memory soon became a series of even more unfortunate events in which the winner of such a gamble had not been an expert of extracting memories, and had taken certain ones not, in fact, limited to the short-term ones he had initially thought expendable enough to gamble with.

And so, Crowley was sat on a box, in the middle of the desert, knowing that he knew how to magic himself away, but not entirely sure _how._ Or where he was. Or how he had got into this situation, other than someone had said “you would never” to him, and so he had.

“I don’t think your cactus will fit in the house, dear.”

Crowley looked up to see a pudgy angel topped with golden curls and a wry smile.

Crowley realised he was not as ready to admit his mistake to just anyone. Perhaps to a demon a few ranks above himself, or to a human so that they may pity him and assist in his escape, but to a seraphic bundle of tweed and golden curls? “Move along, angel, nothing to see here.”

A small part of his mind reminded him that self-preservation was an adequate excuse to be talking to angels. “Wait,” he said to the angel who had not, Crowley belatedly realised, even made a cursory attempt at leaving. “Where, exactly, are we?”

“The Patagonian Desert,” the angel said, with the raise of one eyebrow. “Argentina?”

“Ah.”

“Would you like coordinates?” The angel asked, and Crowley suspected he might have been being made fun of. “Are you feeling quite alright, dear?” the angel asked when Crowley just gave him an offhanded hiss.

“Quite,” Crowley mimicked with a terse smile.

“Well,” the angel said, evidently not believing him, “Are we taking the cactus with us? Only, it seems too tall to fit into the living-room...”

Crowley followed the angel’s gaze to the cactus he had adopted as a back-rest. It was certainly over six-foot, and had been casting a rather delightful shadow over him for at least one or two of the hours he had been out here.

Crowley didn’t understand angel humour at the best of times, but this one was perhaps attempting some sort of _avant garde_ performance that, try as he might, Crowley could not decipher. Was he being arrested by this angel? Perhaps he had done more in his memory-less state than he had previously thought.

The angel was shading his eyes from the sun as he looked up at the cactus, so Crowley took the opportunity to assess him. Certainly run of the mill, vaguely familiar in the way most angels were… Crowley noticed that the angel’s arm had three hairbands on it, in assorted colours.

Crowley thought of this slightly odd, even for an angel. The angel’s hair did not seem long enough to tie back, the curls far too unwieldy even if he could scrape back a small ponytail. Unless angels had started some sort of good-will campaign, handing out hairbands to those in need? Crowley, for one, admitted that such a scheme would be forever useful. He was always losing his own hairbands, and unless someone had one to hand, his hair would forever be falling into his eyes.

_Someone_ ? Crowley asked himself. When was the last time he had buddied up to someone enough for them to carry around spare hairbands? Never, right? Unless, of course, the small matter regarding his memoryless state might pertain some information as to why he felt that there _was_ someone.

“I think,” Crowley said, frowning slightly at having to admit the thought to the angel, but having very few others to reveal the revelation to, “The kid who stole my memories took memories regarding some sort of… lover.”

“Lover?” The angel was decidedly aghast, ejecting the word like it had punched him in the gut and had made him spit the word out. Well, angels were prudes, for all their cupid-like looks.

“Yes, angel,” Crowley said, quite enjoying teasing the fellow. “Lover. Well. At least that is what I assume this… _feeling_ is.” Crowley made a show of saying the word as if he despised it, and the implication of softness, but the angel was giving him a profoundly pitying look, which was not quite what Crowley had been aiming for.

“Hold on,” the angel said, coming to himself, “Memories? Stolen? ...All of them?”

It seemed the angel was made entirely of questioning spirit. Crowley sat back, preparing himself to tell as much of the story as he could. He didn’t particularly _hate_ angels; they were, after all, a constant in his life, an occupational hazard as it were, and it became rather wearisome keeping up the whole rivalry facade…

“It’s a long story,” Crowley said, not in a dismissive tone, hoping, in fact, to wile away some of the hours until he regained what memories he could. “Would you like a… whatever this is?” he asked, handing a fresh bottle to the angel, who took it without question and started to drink like a trooper. He wasn’t so bad, Crowley thought, vaguely.

“So I’m in this bar,” Crowley started, deciding he would invent a more exciting start to the story once he knew how it had happened, and could throw in some believable fibs. “When this kid sits down opposite me. I buy him a drink—”

“How old,” the angel asked, sitting himself on the dirt before Crowley and looking vaguely concerned.

“Oh, no younger than fifteen,” Crowley said.

“The national drinking age in Chile is twenty one,” the angel said, with a sigh in his voice. “But continue.”

“So I buy him a drink, and this kid, he’s got this hood over his eyes, all mysterious. Ineffable.” The angel gave him a look, but, probably not wanting to interrupt him again, brought the bottle to his lips.

“So, he says, ‘hey, as thanks, you want me to teach you a game?’ And look, I was bored, probably, and this strange kid offering to scam me? I’m all ears. Sure, I say, what’s the bet? Can’t be a proper game without a bit of a gamble, you know, hoping to instill some sinfulness while I could, right? But he looks at me like he’s hit the jackpot, which was odd, but I’ve met stranger, and he leans all close...” Crowley mimicked the movement. “And he says ‘we gamble our memories’.”

The angel had closed his eyes and was pinching the bridge of his nose, as if he was genuinely concerned for Crowley, which was odd. But, angels were strange creatures with consciences, so he allowed that the angel might have had some to spare for Crowley.

“Well it was novel, I thought, so I said yes, thinking this kid was, at worst, some mediocre witch who might administer some short-term amnesia drug while his human victim wasn’t looking and nick his wallet, but erm. I seem to be in a desert in Argentina—”

“Patagonia,” the angel helped.

“Right, Patagonia, sitting on a box of unidentifiable alcohol and er. Having forgotten how to poof.” Crowley mimed the last word with the fingers of one hand. “And possibly more, like the lover. But I’m not sure.”

“Do you remember your name?” the angel asked, once Crowley had finished.

“Crawly.”

The angel seemed to be shaking, and for one horrible second, Crowley was genuinely concerned his name had inspired some sort of intense fear in the poor angel.

Humiliatingly, the angel was, in fact, attempting not to laugh. “ _Crowley,_ ” the angel said, still giggling, and Crowley felt the name fit into place.

“Crowley. Of course. Chr— Go— _Damn_ , how did I…” The whole memory-loss thing had suddenly become quite seriously personal. Remembering his location was on-par with a particularly bad hangover. Forgetting his name was… unnerving.

“I suppose one must be thankful you regained your memory of your name at just the hearing of it,” the angel said, before looking down. “Aziraphale.”

“Bless you,” Crowley said, thinking the joke funny. The angel did not, it seemed.

“My name is Aziraphale,” the angel said, slightly more insistent, and Crowley nodded.

“Sure. Nice to meet you, I guess.”

The angel, Aziraphale, was frowning a lot more, now, which was also unnerving. This entire fiasco was unnerving, and Crowley wanted to be at home, on the sofa, feeling warm. He frowned at the mental image. It was of a sofa dissimilar to the one Crowley knew lay in his own house. He was imagining an old, patchy and soft one, not the minimalist black leather of the one of Crowley’s apartment.

He was also associating the sofa with laying his head in a lap, which would have been very impractical on Crowley’s one-person-could-be-seated-at-a-push sofa. The point of his sofa was to be uninviting, and yet here he was, yearning to be on a sofa, at a home Crowley couldn’t remember, feeling warm.

“I feel sick,” Aziraphale said, quite suddenly, but Crowley didn’t feel like he could blame him.

“Must be this,” Crowley said, holding his bottle up to the light. “Hey, look, sorry to be that guy and all, but you wouldn’t be able to tell me how to _poof_?”

“Well, it’s…” Aziraphale looked pained. “Like riding a bike, and all that. You just kind of… do it.”

“Except no, you pedal, the pedals turn gears, which turn wheels, _voila_ , motion.”

Aziraphale thought for a second. “The concept is the same for the most part… though one tends to skip the first few and start at the erm, _voila,_ motion.”

“...Great.”

“We’ll just have to fly,” Aziraphale said with a small shrug. “It’ll be longer, but I suppose we could stop at that steak-house you…” The angel paused. “Might. Like,” he continued, with a suspicious lilt of disguised familiarity.

“Do I know you?” Aziraphale looked up with such hope that Crowley was very nearly bowled over. So that was a yes, then.

“You remember?”

“False alarm. ...sorry.” Crowley hoped he hadn’t done anything particularly dastardly to this angel. _He’s pretty_ , Crowley thought, before correcting himself. The angel had helped him, was all. Attractiveness had very little to do with it, in the grand scheme of things.

Aziraphale sighed, but stood, and Crowley admired his dedication, if nothing else. “Come on, then, I suppose we should get out of this desert.”

Right. Flying. “I forgot I could fly,” Crowley said, standing up himself and stretching. Flying. Right. “...Only. How exactly is one expected to fly?”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows met in the middle, a new record for frown depth. Then there was a sound like a flock of birds taking flight, and then Aziraphale had wings.

Of course he had wings, he was an angel. Right, _right_ , Crowley had wings too. He just had to… find them. There had to be a release, somewhere. Like a spring-loaded catch. “Yeah, I uh. I can’t remember how to do that, either. You wouldn’t happen to know if I have them?”

“What, _wings_? Of course you do, Crowley, you’re a demon.” Crowley thought he could hear the slight lilt of hysteria in the angel’s disbelief. It might have been amusing to hear maybe three days ago, but as it was, the angel’s panic was only really serving to panic Crowley.

“Okay, look, I’ll carry you. Maybe being in the air will remind you.”

“Right.” Crowley nodded, hoping to convince himself.

Aziraphale held his arms out before him.

“What?” Crowley asked, looking at the cradled position.

“I can’t exactly give you a piggy-back,” Aziraphale said, pointing one thumb at the wings which would, Crowley supposed get in the way of a comfortable ride.

“So you’re going to _bridal lift_ me to the nearest town?”

“We could walk,” Aziraphale suggested. So, swallowing much pride, Crowley dumped himself into Aziraphale’s arms. Once there, Aziraphale seemed to take Crowley in properly for the first time, and if the look levelled at him was any indication, Crowley was dressed as strangely as he’d thought.

“Do you remember why you’re dressed so?”

“I was hoping you might know,” Crowley admitted. He was quite sure, memory-loss or not, that his style was usually blacks and blood reds rather than military (or military-esque) moss greens and camo.

“No, it’s quite the mystery. You were wearing a shirt when you left,” Aziraphale mused, _sotto voce_.  

“Hold on, when I left? Okay, angel, if you think you can play a game with me because I’m in a slightly vulnerable position…”

“ _Crowley_ ,” the angel said, with something like warning in his voice, though it might equally have been exasperation, “I think it best you spend the journey attempting to remember anything you might have forgotten.”

Disgruntled, Crowley simmered for the rest of the flight, making himself as uncomfortable to hold as possible (without the actual threat of being dropped; he imagined the embarrassment would be his rather than the angel’s in such a situation.) After a quick stopover in Buenos Aires for _asado_ , they continued over the ocean towards Europe.

Crowley eventually stopped being petulant when it became increasingly more obvious that the angel was going through a lot to literally carry Crowley’s ungrateful self back to England, so he stopped wriggling in the angel’s grip. He also attempted to warm the angel’s hands by very subtly covering the fingers exposed to the ocean winds nearest his armpit with his own in the hopes that the angel wouldn’t get a cold or anything.

He tried to think of where he could have possibly met the angel before, but he was coming up blank. So blank, in fact, it was suspicious. Crowley could almost catalogue every angel he’d come across for the last several millennia, yet this one, who was so obviously affected by Crowley’s presence, he just couldn’t place.

So, the logical answer seemed to be, the mystery kid had taken his memories of this angel. Plausible, certainly, but why? A mistake, perhaps: Crowley had gambled his short-term memories away, the memories of this angel might have been recent and inconsequential enough to be mistaken for short-term.

Somehow, he couldn’t quite convince himself.

The pair breakfasted in Cornwall, where Aziraphale ordered a (well-deserved, Crowley thought,) mountain of scones, complete with clotted cream and selection of jams, before their slower morning travel across to London. Aziraphale had also, Crowley couldn’t prevent himself from noticing, ordered for Crowley, as if he knew exactly what he would want.

Back in London, Aziraphale set Crowley down before an aged bookshop, removing a key from a pocket Crowley assumed was mostly for show, before letting him in, and directing him up the stairs at the back of the shop. The apartment above was of a generous size (perhaps more generous than would actually fit above a shop in London without a miracle), and certainly very cozy. It suited the angel well.

Aziraphale opened a door at one end of the corridor and made an ‘enter’ gesture, so Crowley did. It looked almost exactly as Crowley would decorate a room. Uncannily so, in fact. He opened the wardrobe door. Those were certainly Crowley’s shirts, and they were certainly in this angel’s house. He closed the wardrobe and looked about. The room had a plant on every physical (and some non-physical) surface, and they were not just any plants. They were his plants. “Sam!” he said, noticing the potted cactus.

“Of course you would remember the cactus,” Aziraphale was saying from the doorway.

“Emma, Jackson, Ishmael… Oh you all need watering, I’m sorry I left you for so long…” He reached for his mist spray bottle, and found it exactly where he’d thought it would be. He would ignore that coincidence for the time being.

“...You name all of them?”

“Of course I do.” Crowley looked about his plants, feeling the familiarity of just being among them, despite their apparent move from his apartment to the spare room of this angel’s bookshop. “Stop me if I’m jumping the gun, but am I to understand we… live together?”

Aziraphale nodded.

“And you didn’t know I named my plants?” Crowley asked, skeptical. There was little to be skeptical about, of course, it wasn’t as if this angel would concoct a plan to convince him they were friendlier than they actually had been, but it was strange that he would live with someone, _an angel_ , and not tell the guy he named his plants.

The angel was looking at Crowley like he was going to do something quite baffling, like maybe cry, but he didn’t, only went to leave. “Right. Well. I suppose I should attempt to research this… amnesia of yours. You get some rest. Perhaps a good night’s sleep will do the trick.”

“...Yeah. ...Thanks, I guess.” Crowley put Sam down on the side as Aziraphale pulled the door closed. After watering his neglected plants, he sat on his bed. Technically, he did not need sleep, so he assumed the suggestion was metaphorical, an almost human attempt to relegate Crowley to his room to help regain his memories.

He wiped a palm against his trousers, the action reminding him that he was still in the costume, incongruous to almost everything he stood for. Just his luck, he couldn’t quite think how to change at the click of his fingers and so he stripped each article of clothing, replacing them with ones he (thankfully) kept a stock of.

He eyed a onesie hanging at one end of the wardrobe (soft, he knew, and with a comical plush tail like the drawing of a devil) but refrained from wearing it. Somehow, despite knowing it was his, he felt it was accompanied by a story, missing. To wear it would be like wearing a dead man’s clothes. Instead he wore pyjamas. The safer choice. In the morning, he decided, he would change into one of his crisp, white shirts and he would feel like himself again.

As he lay down, he remembered his hair, tied in a small ponytail, and went to remove the band. He looked at it in the dim light of the room. Pink. Well, that was hardly army regulation.

Sunglasses, he realised. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. No wonder it had been so bright. It made him think about what else he might have been missing and so, abandoning thoughts of lying back for the night, he made an inventory of the room. Perhaps something here would remind him of his past.

-

“Any luck?” Crowley asked, depositing himself on the sofa he had been attempting not to put too much significance in thinking about. It was just a sofa, he told himself. An old, patchy, soft sofa much like the one of Crowley’s mind’s eye.

“No…” Aziraphale was slouched at the dining table, still in his own pyjamas (checkered, also soft, Crowley thought with some surprise.) “There seems to be no known cure to amnesia and cases of mythical causes tend to end with very unscientific solutions.”

“Like?” Crowley asked, ready to try anything.

“Well, frankly, most are ‘true love’s kiss’, but you cannot seem to remember your lover, and as such, it may be an unfortunate case of unsolvable crime.”

“...We should try to find that kid and make him talk,” Crowley said, trying to recall the kid’s features.

“I suppose that might raise some answers. Which bar were you in?”

“...er.” It had been dark and grimy, but that probably described most bars.

“...What country were you in?” Aziraphale tried.

“...hm.”

“Was this before or after you joined the army?”

“...Okay, so we don’t try to find the kid.”

“Probably wise. Did you remember anything last night?”

Crowley hummed. “One of my plants is missing. It’s strange, I can’t remember the most simple things, but I know that Erica isn’t there.”

“Oh, really?” The angel sipped his cocoa, carefully. “Which one is Erica?”

“The jade plant in the egg-shell blue vase.” At Aziraphale’s blank look, Crowley elaborated. “It’s a succulent.”

“Perhaps you’re remembering a plant you used to have?”

“Maybe…” Crowley conceded that it was a fair point, but something told him he could differentiate between recent memories and ones more distant.

“You’re not convinced.” Aziraphale sat back in his chair, glanced at Crowley and clicked his fingers so he was in an outfit similar to yesterday’s. Shirt, vest, round glasses that looked like someone might call them ‘spectacles’.

“I _know_ I put Erica next to Sam before I left…” Crowley brightened. “Before I left!”

Aziraphale mimicked Crowley’s return of spirits. “You remember leaving.”

Crowley sat up, now able to picture the room as it had been when he’d decided to go…

He still could not remember Aziraphale, but, assuming the context, he would just place the mystery angel in the place of the blanks, for argument’s sake. So, sofa, conversation, Sam… “I wanted a sibling for Sam,” Crowley said, squinting as he tried to extract more from his conscience. It was like gripping at air, blindingly swiping for anything to latch onto. “...Chile? I said I hadn’t been to Chile recently… You said that I would never do it!”

“Did I?” Aziraphale said, with a small tilt of the head. “That doesn’t sound like anything I would like to imply.”

“Well you did, so I went to prove you wrong.”

Aziraphale cast his mind back, locating the moments before he fell asleep. “All that way for a cactus?” he remembered, “ _Crowley_ , you would never forgive yourself if you dropped it on the way over, or some such. Ah yes, I remember, I fell asleep mid-thought.”

“Oh.” Crowley felt rather awkward at the suggestion of his past-self’s rashness. This would explain the angel’s first words to him in the desert…. Perhaps he should go back and grab the cactus. It _had_ been pretty cool. “So then… mystery solved?”

“Do you remember everything? Do you remember me?”

Crowley lay back down on the sofa. “No,” he admitted. “You couldn’t give me a hint?”

“I’ve come to the very recent revelation that we might have had very different opinions of one another,” Aziraphale said, slowly. “You’ve revealed much that… you would not have done had you had your memories.”

“You make it sound like I’m a complete dick,” Crowley said, not knowing whether to feel offended or complemented. His job description _was_ to be a dick, but to know he’d inadvertently lied to this angel… the thought did not please him.

“Well, you are a demon after all. I suppose it was my own fault for believing you.”

Crowley felt the words like a physical stab. He wanted to defend himself, but didn’t even know whether he was worth defending. He was starting to dislike his past-self for causing all this unknown pain on this poor angel. What a world they lived in.

“What did you believe?” Crowley said, thinking that maybe he could make up for his past self’s shitty attitude.

“I do not feel entirely comfortable discussing that with you,” Aziraphale said, with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

That, Crowley thought, was fair enough, but he still did not want to let it go, quite yet. This angel seemed determined to get Crowley to remember, and it was all he could do to make it up to the angel by doing just that. Crowley sat up again, resolved to help.

His hair, long and loose, was distracting. He went to tie it up, only to realise his pink band from yesterday had disappeared. Typical. “Angel, hairband.” Crowley held out a hand and a blood-red band was placed in his palm. It was like a ritual. Familiar.

Aziraphale lingered on the moment more the Crowley did. The angel was looking at him, a mixed sense of hurt and responsibility, before he finally spoke. “I killed Erica.”

“Excuse me?” It took a moment for Crowley to associate ‘Erica’ with _his_ Erica, especially with the sense of dirity from Aziraphale’s voice.

“Or, rather, she dropped, and shattered, and her stem broke…” Aziraphale sounded, Crowley thought, like he had actually murdered a man, and had been battling his morality for the better part of the week.

A small part of Crowley’s heart broke for the plant, but things died, accidents happened, etcetera. Perhaps they should go to that new garden-centre after all. It would certainly save crossing the Atlantic. Though he certainly enjoyed that journey more than he had the three-days’ pickling in the Argentinian sun.

“Hold on,” Crowley pinned the angel with a frown. “When I said I bought the kid a drink, you said the drinking age in _Chile_ was twenty one.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale looked nonplussed at the apparent non-sequitur.

“We were in the Patagonian desert. In Argentina. Why did you think I was in a bar in _Chile?”_

“Ah.” Aziraphale looked, more than anything, rather peeved to have been caught in the lie. He did look apologetic, though, which Crowley thought he would appreciate more than he did.

“Well, I knew you had gone to Chile first… and I knew you loved that plant…”

“So you hired a child to steal my memories because you killed Erica?”

“Correct.”

“Hadn’t you ever heard of ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’?”

“I didn’t really pit you as a follower of such thought.”

Again, Crowley conceded, that was a fair enough assumption. “And then you made me join the army?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, “I’m just as confused about the uniform as you are. I take that to mean you haven’t regained everything yet?” Crowley shook his head.

“...I realise it may be rather hard to trust my word as of right now, but my honest intentions were only that you would forget the single plant.”

Despite everything, Crowley did trust him. Not that he would admit it, just yet, but he did. The sincerity of Aziraphale’s expression didn’t seem mimicked. “Who are you, angel.” Crowley tried to focus on the angel’s face, from the lines of his nose  to the cut of his clothes, trying to find anything, any frame of reference he might recognise. “Who are you, to me?”

Aziraphale’s jaw clenched. “Unimportant. ...A friend.”

Well, that answered that, then. Crowley, very importantly, did not have friends. As such, this angel’s claim to be ‘a friend’ was highly irregular. He was a friend, they were cohabiting, and Crowley could remember his head in a warm lap.

He stood up, fixing a pointed look on the angel. If Crowley knew himself (and he liked to think he did, usually,) this entire fiasco was the product of one very fixable error in miscommunication; something he had never been very good at rectifying before. Perhaps today, he could change that.

“I,” Crowley said, hoping to whichever party he was supposed to pray to on the matter that he was right, “Love you. I think.”

Aziraphale went very still, as if he had been fastened into place. He forgot to blink; an action they really only kept up so as to not look too uncanny to the human observer.

“This whole mess,” Crowley continued, “And I have only one hole to fit with one puzzle-piece. The er, mystery ‘lover’,” he said, holding out one hand, “And you.” He held out the other, before touching the two hands together. “Hence…”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said softly, though still frozen to his chair.”That’s good.”

“‘Good’?” Crowley echoed, “You don’t sound very sure.”

“It all seems a little anticlimactic, is all.” Aziraphale finally blinked, then blinked again, as if he had finally rebooted. “Only, literal millennia of pining and all, and all it takes is a little amnesia to bring it all out.”

“Well,” Crowley said, “Better late than never?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Neither seemed to know how to overcome the next barrier, though. “So, the love is mutual, though I can’t seem to remember it.”

Aziraphale slouched. “Just our luck, I’m sure.”

“Well,” Crowley said, “There’s only one thing for it.”

“Yes?”

“True love’s kiss.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes in a pointedly overdramatic gesture that Crowley thought really did not do justice to his attempt at being charming. “I’m not kissing you to prove a point.”

“What? Why?”

“Why?” Aziraphale sniffed. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“That doesn’t make sense, and you know it, angel.” Crowley stood up, paced, then attempted to change tactics. “Russia.”

“You remember Russia?” Aziraphale had gone a significantly paler shade. “All this, and you remember _Russia_ ? Even _I_ want to forget Russia.”

“Oh _good_ , I thought for one horrible second you were going to say ‘Russia?’ and I’d have been confronted with the possibility that that abysmal kiss had been with a fisherman.”

“If only.” Aziraphale looked up for one moment to send Crowley a withering look. “Will you stop pacing, dear? You’ll wear a track in the carpet.”

Crowley bit his lip. Looked down at the carpet. It wasn’t a very nice carpet. His eye twitched. Something told him he knew how to do what he wanted to do. He clicked his fingers, and the moth-eaten, discoloured carpet had gone. Instead was the pristine tiling of his old apartment’s kitchen; black and white tiles in a perfectly symmetrical diagonal pattern. He looked up at the angel: at once taken aback and inconsolably smug.

The smugness, he discovered, would not last for long. When he had gotten out of bed that morning, he had opted for socks: though he did not plan to leave the house that day, he thought he might enjoy the luxury of warming his toes. On carpet, this had not been a problem. He might have been working up some static, but that would only have led to a harmless (yet hilarious) future prank.

As it was, Crowley could feel himself falling backwards as he slipped on the pristine (and thus incredibly slippery) tiling. So he reached out— Only as he grabbed Aziraphale’s arm did he remember the sensation of having wings and, overjoyed to remember, freed the wings— The sudden increase of weight imbalanced him further and his momentum sped, his instinct telling him to grip, ...causing Aziraphale to come crashing down with him.

One of them, Crowley wasn’t entirely sure which, had returned the carpet a moment before they had landed and had softened the impact mightily. “Ow,” Crowley said, mostly for want of something to say. But also, “Look! Wings!” Crowley flapped them a bit, just to show he could do it. They dragged across the floor a bit as he did so, but he was enjoying having the sensation back. He wondered how he could even have forgotten; it was like remembering you had another pair of arms.

Aziraphale, Crowley realised, his wings coming to an abrupt stop, was very much straddling Crowley, and giving him a look of such fondness from below his eyelashes, and his glasses, that he was almost glowing. “Oh,” Crowley said, again, mostly for lack of anything else to say.

Aziraphale dipped closer and left a small kiss on Crowley’s lips. And there he was. Crowley’s angel. Aziraphale, of course, of course it was Aziraphale. But, being Crowley, he could not let an opportunity for mischief pass. “Are you sure that was you in Russia? Because I don’t remember the kiss being quite so innocent…”

Aziraphale, for his part, took it as a challenge.

They decided, later that day, to take tea at the garden centre. They would make a day out of it.


	2. A prequel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tying of loose ends.

Laertes was a young man whose father had been very enamoured with a certain work of literature and had greatly looked forwards to the naming of his firstborn son so as to impart on him a name worthy of his heritage.

Laertes’ heritage was not, in fact, much of one to inherit; accountants, mostly, though with an actress or two on his mother’s side. He supposed that was where he had gotten his love of theatrics.

His love of theatrics had begun with stage magic. By four, he was rather good at pulling various things out of hats and sleeves. By ten, he had worked in special effects. Mostly glitter, though occasionally (and with supervision) he was allowed the odd crackle of stage-safe sparks.

On the cusp of puberty, he had been apprenticed to a local man whose image as the town’s inebriate was, he found, mostly for show. Audiences tended to be much more impressed when their expectations, going in, are that a drunk man is going to ask them to pick a card.

The man was not what he seemed and, so, Laertes found himself conning demons out of memories in bars in Chile because his master’s acquaintance, the bookshop owner that (sometimes) let them buy books needed a favour, and his master had an image as a drunk to cultivate.

It had been Laertes’ first time abroad, if he didn’t count that one school-trip to the Isle of Wight in year six. His friends had complained a lot about the flight over to America before… a boy in his class went on and on about how he’d had to get on a thirteen hour flight when he’d been visiting his cousins in California over summer. Laertes smiled a bit at that. His flight hadn’t been nearly as unpleasant.

He had simply been standing in the angel’s bookshop one second, and in a steamy bar in Chile the next. He had pulled the hood down his face (he was still fifteen, and certainly looked it,) and had waited in a particularly dark corner for the demon he had seen a few times before.

As far as he understood it, this demon and that angel weren’t like the other angels and demons, and lived in a kind of harmony above the shop. The demon liked to pretend he had nothing to do with the angel and look _cool_ , in both senses, as he sat behind the cashier’s desk in his shades, checking his nails. Laertes didn’t know how much more interesting a demon’s nails could be compared to a human’s, but the demon seemed to spend _hours_ doing it while his master and the angel talked about bibles.

Once or twice the demon would look up, catch Laertes watching him, then indicate the bible-conversation with a look that read ‘please tell me you think this as dull as I do.’ Laertes would usually show the demon a half-smile and half-shrug, not really knowing what the etiquette was when one communicated with demons, and not wanting to piss his master off either.

Then the demon would sigh, dramatically, before going back to checking his nails. Laertes would resume watching him from the corner of his eye, and eventually his master and the angel would run out of things to say about bibles.

The angel had promised Laertes that the demon would not recognise him: he assured Laertes that the demon was not particularly observant of humans he didn’t care much for, and was not allowed to taint, but he had followed up his claim by laying a small deflection miracle over Laertes, allowing any onlooker to care very little about his appearance.

So, trap laid, demon spotted, Laertes sat opposite the demon and proceeded to win (using loaded die,) the demon’s memories. It was a specific one the angel wanted: he had broken the demon’s plant, Erica, and he would be pissed if he knew.

Laertes had promised a swift extraction, and given the angel a mock-salute. He had actually hoped to check his magician’s guide-book one last time before being whisked away, but he supposed he probably knew the formula enough, now. So, one pliant demon, one memory spell.

It turned out, doing magic in a reasonably-packed bar in Chile on a saturday evening was not actually something one could do without being observed. Laertes had removed the hood shading his eyes, relying (perhaps a little too much) on the angel’s miracle. It turned out that magic seemed to counter the miracle, and his shoots of light as he passed his hand over Crowley drew the attention of the bouncer.

Who, for reasons Laertes couldn’t even begin to imagine, grabbed the boy by the collar and hauled him out, shouting “que no se ven veintiuno para mí, amigo.” Laertes’ two years of Spanish in school translated this to something like “you don’t look 21 to me,” just before the doors closed in his face. It was only once he was on the street, in Chile, on a saturday evening at about quarter to ten, did he wonder how he was supposed to get home.

He checked his pockets for anything of use, and found a crumpled fiver that wouldn’t be of much use, he thought, until the currency exchange opened in the morning. Then, he thought, he could call his master and ask him to send the angel to come bring him back.

Planning an option B, he decided to wait at the doors for the demon, who, now the miracle had worn off, would probably recognise him. He could say “wow what a coincidence to meet you here!” or “Your angel sent me to find you!” and then ask to hitch a lift back to London.

He didn’t wait very long. The demon, now sans sunglasses, Laertes noted, walked out of the bar, looking ever-so-slightly dazed. He looked like his master did, after a fairly convincing evening of drinking, and so Laertes assumed that Crowley had spent the better part of the last hour doing his best impression of a fish.

“Hey,” Laertes said, “Fancy meeting you, here!”

The demon looked down at him, frowning. “You’re speaking English.”

Laertes licked his lips. “Yeah. Yeah… I… do that.”

The demon nodded, then looked around. “I think I need to catch a bus home.”

Laertes didn’t think buses went from Chile to London, but he didn’t want to say that to the demon, in case he was wrong, and he looked stupid. “Oh.” Catching a bus probably took way longer than being instantly transported, or even a domestic flight did. Laertes decided plan A was probably better afterall. “Okay. Get home safe.”

The demon nodded, then went off looking for a bus stop.

Laertes spent the night walking around Santiago. Most things were closed, and once he’d made a loop of the town, there wasn’t much else to do, so he sat on a bench and sighed. Tomorrow morning, he thought, he’d change his money, phone his master, and maybe use what was left of the fiver to buy something cool for breakfast and a post-card.

Laertes, being newly fledged and still rather cocky, did not wonder about the demon’s dazed state, or think about how the bar’s bodyguard had very enthusiastically lurched Laertes’ hand across the demon’s head in his removal of the boy from the bar. He thought it had all gone down pretty well for his first real attempt at magic.

-

Crowley, for his part, did not like that there was a very British-looking boy saying disarming things like “fancy meeting you, here” in places he didn’t recognise, and so, once he had caught his bus, he wiped it from his memory by calling it a ‘dream’, or ‘hallucination’.

He had woken up in the bar with a thumping headache, and the sight of the English Indian boy with big eyes and a friendly smile was incongruous to everything else. Crowley hadn’t recognised him, so he must have been fake.

At the end of the busride, Crowley was not any more awake than he had been when he’d gotten on it, and as such, he did not realise as the bus (a military people-carrier) had crossed the border of a military base, complete with drill-sergeants and lieutenants and all such necessities.

When asked his name, he had answered with “Samuel Kaktos”, the first name to come to mind.

Had Crowley not been in a state of memory-loss, he might have realised that as he said the name, the name had appeared on the documents in front of the person signing the new recruits in as if one Mr. Kaktos was expected. He might also have realised that the bus he had “caught” last night had been rather less a figure of speech: the vehicle, having passed the demon, had lurched to a stop, Crowley had stepped on, and the vehicle had carried on, much to the driver’s continued confusion.

-

Crowley spent much of his time in Aziraphale’s bookshop, pretending to inspect his nails. He was, in fact, actually watching the angel, but he did not want to seem like he would openly pine for anyone, divine or not, and so he had carefully mastered the act of seeming impervious to the world.

After the rather memorable events regarding the memory loss, Crowley had found himself able to spend less time pretending to look at his nails and more time with his chin in his hand, adoring the angel openly.

“You managed to get the bus back, then?” Said a voice, very directly to his left.

Crowley realised the open adoration left him in a very vulnerable position, in that most of his senses seemed to focus entirely on the angel, leaving none to tell him when small humans were sneaking up on him. He managed (very suavely, he thought,) to pretend as if he were checking his nails, but from a closer angle. Too close for any effective nail-checking, but he hoped the boy wouldn’t notice.

Laertes did, in fact, notice. He had actually been in the shop for more than three hours, now, practising an invisibility magic that had, he thought, been going very well. And if it worked this well on the immortal creatures, imagine the effects on mortal!

The results of his experiment had only been slightly marred by the sudden realisation that the demon had not, actually, been checking his nails when Laertes had watched him, but had really been trying to watch the angel surreptitiously. But maybe Laertes’ memory magic had worked so well, the demon and the angel had gone from friends to _close_ friends, because the demon wasn’t even _pretending_ to pretend anymore.

After a couple of seconds, Laertes cleared his throat, his question still unanswered. “The bus? You managed to get home? From Chile?”

That made the demon stop checking his nails and turn to Laertes very seriously.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, well, when I saw you, you were very adamant that you wanted to get the bus.” Laertes glanced at the angel, who was busy talking to the master, and so he thought he could probably talk to the demon without saying something wrong, because it was only wrong if the person who told you not to say anything about the thing was actually listening.

“You were in Chile?”

“Erm. Yeah.” Laertes had thought that demons and angels were omniscient, what with their relative acquaintances with God and the devil.

“In a bar?”

“Er. Not for long,” Laertes admitted, “But yeah.”

“You did the memory thing?”

Laertes grinned at that. He was still proud. “Yeah.”

“Well I hope you enjoyed your vacation, _kid,_ ” the demon said. There was something in the way he inflected the last word, kid, that at once grated on, and terrified Laertes. “Because it’ll have been your last—”

The demon’s last words, a threat, Laertes vaguely registered, were rather quieter than the first as the angel was now standing beside them, smiling like he honestly hadn’t expected the pair to ever meet, and was frantically hoping they hadn’t said anything to one another.

“Laertes, my boy,” the angel said, the words cheerful enough.

“Hi,” Laertes responded, before wincing under his master’s look. “Er, good afternoon, sir.”

“I hope dear Crowley isn’t hassling you?” the angel asked, his smile not really a real smile.

“Oi, angel, it’s too late, the cat’s out the bag, I know what he did—”

As the angel replied that Crowley was rather too hasty in his implications and assumptions.

Laertes’ master had appeared behind him and was starting to direct Laertes out of the shop.

“But,” Laertes attempted to protest, hoping to hear more of what a divine versus divine fight might look like, but his master was having none of it.

“Trust me, kid, it isn’t worth it.”

Laertes would have been rather unimpressed by the remainder of the divine conversation, anyway. It had ended, quite anticlimactically (in his eyes, at least,) with a kiss, and an apology, and a matching pair of mugs of hot cocoa, to calm them down while they sat on the comfortable sofa, the angel listening to his demon talk about his (eventually _their_ ) plants.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me @ ninjaninaiii.tumblr.com, again plz check my main man kogla.tumblr.com


End file.
